Children’s health, or pediatrics, focuses on the well-being of children from conception through adolescence. It is vitally concerned with all aspects of children’s growth and development and with the unique opportunity that each child has to achieve their full potential as a healthy adult.
Children’s health was once a subset of adult medicine. In the 19th and early 20th century, people recognized pediatrics as a medical specialty because of the gradual awareness that the health problems of children are different from those of adults. It was also recognized that a child’s response to illness, medications, and the environment depends upon the age of the child.